So you just read a rave restaurant review, you have an anniversary approaching and that settles it: you'll splurge on dinner for two at RPM Steak. We're sure you'll enjoy the New York Strip, the risotto with white truffles and the romance … of a 4:30 p.m. Tuesday seating.

Oh, you wanted Saturday at 8? Sorry, all booked.

For some of Chicago's best and hottest restaurants, the reservation process is frustrating: Customers struggle to get tables (or wonder who you gotta know to get one), while restaurateurs spend hours every day on the phone turning people away. Restaurants like it even less when reservation-holders don't show up, costing them revenue.

The Internet has solved more important problems, but the new approach of selling advance restaurant tickets via a website opens up a smart alternative to the traditional reservation. You buy tickets to see a show, why not for sushi?

The idea comes from Nick Kokonas and chef Grant Achatz, the partners responsible for two of the city's most acclaimed restaurants, Alinea and Next. Having figured out that a ticket system is a better way to manage their extraordinary booking demand, Kokonas and Achatz are expanding on the idea with outside investors. Their new company, Tock, will introduce the ticket system to a handful of other fine dining establishments across the country, including Thomas Keller's Per Se in New York and French Laundry in Napa Valley.

Kokonas embraced the concept because of the stupendous demand for tables at Alinea, one of the world's best. As he explained in a blog post this year, 70 percent of diners want a Friday or Saturday table, requiring him to employ full-time help to answer the phone just to turn down most people. Yet Alinea still had a no-show rate of 8 percent. For a restaurant where dinner for two can reach $1,000, Kokonas said he lost an average of $260,000 a year, mostly when only two diners from a party of four showed up.

The advantages of a ticket system are obvious for the restaurateurs: planning and efficiency. The restaurants don't waste money on unnecessary phone staff help or food that gets thrown out because everyone pre-paid and will show up. By collecting revenue in advance, they also can negotiate better prices from purveyors.

Kokonas makes a point, too, about bringing more transparency to a tradition based on mistrust and mystery: Customers, who suspect they are being lied to about availability, make reservations they know they might not keep, while restaurateurs accept 8 p.m. reservations knowing the table won't be ready until 8:45, so why don't you wait in the bar (and run up a tab)?

"Traditional restaurant reservations are predicated on two people lying to each other," Kokonas wrote.

The ticketing-based system gives diners a better shot at competitive tables, because only serious customers will commit. Those efficiencies also could benefit diners: If everyone wants a Friday res, your tickets for a Tuesday night (or Super Bowl Sunday, when no one eats out) may well sell at a discount.

The system works best for high-demand restaurants with prix fixe menus, but you can imagine restaurants selling reservation tickets for, say, $20 applicable toward your bill (but get an extra $10 credit if you dine on Monday!). Maybe it never works for Chuck E. Cheese's, and only for Mother's Day brunch or Valentine's Day at the Cheesecake Factory.

The biggest hurdle is probably cultural. We book airline seats or buy Blackhawks tickets and know to use them or lose them. But the free, trust-based reservation system is a deeply ingrained, populist tradition: "The public expects a certain level of democracy in a restaurant they don't really expect in other businesses," Tribune restaurant critic Phil Vettel told us. "In other businesses taking care of your best customer is common sense, but in a restaurant if you have people who arrive later and get seated first, the other people waiting don't understand that."

Expect that to change. The technology exists to connect businesses and customers digitally, and people want more control over their purchase decisions. Along with that convenience comes the ability to match supply and demand, which means more "dynamic pricing," i.e., movie tickets or Uber trips that cost more at certain times, less at others.

It's a different way of thinking, but in some circumstances, just the ticket.